Wedding Chapel Wednesday: Wedding Portraits Recovered

Copies of two beautiful pictures from the turn of the century came into my possession last year:

If you look closely, you can see that they are from the same portrait. The man’s shoulder and a little smidgen of his hat appears in the woman’s half of the picture. The couple are my Great Aunt and Great Uncle, Maria (Pacheco) Cosma and Joaquim “John Cosma” Jacinto da Camara. They looked quite fancy for people who worked on a sugar plantation in Hawaii.

A week ago, I passed them on to a cousin who is their Granddaughter. Remarkably, she recognized this as their wedding portrait. She remembers it at her Grandmother’s house. After her Grandmother died, the two shots disappeared. They resurfaced in the collection of the couple’s Great Granddaughter. What happened is enough to make a genealogist cringe. After Maria (Pacheco) Cosma’s death, her possessions were gone through and stacked up. Her son, Frank, realized that the pile included these old beautiful pictures and he rescued them. They were saved and passed down through the generations.

I’m deeply grateful to Frank Cosma for making sure we didn’t lose this part of the Pacheco heritage. You see, it’s the only know wedding remembrance from the seven Pacheco siblings who made their way to Kauai, Hawaii with their mother. They all married in Hawaii. Either they could not afford anything but the marriage license or their possessions were lost over time. Maria and Joaquim were married 1 Jan 1893, St. Sylvester’s Church, Kilauea, Kauai, Hawaii. I’m very happy to have these portraits in my collection. They represent a part of the Pacheco heritage which I thought had been lost.